They need to make it more interesting and necessary to drag along your lower end units and barely be able to upgrade them. They need to make it necessary to have towed anti-tank guns, and towed anti-aircraft guns etc..they could easily do this by limiting the number of tracked vehicles or something and forcing you to use towed anti-tank, but they don't, and I am not sure why. Getting self propelled artillery piece should be very hard and something exciting you reach for, not something you can build 7 pieces of and roll all over France and Belgium with.
They should give you some incentive to drag along a panzer I for 6 battles because in the 7th you can add an upgraded tank gun to its hull and it becomes a self propelled tank killer for a low cost thus sparing you some valuable resource points on buying a hull. For a moment it seemed this was how they were going with the game design but then they seemed to have backed off for some reason.
This has been a topic for discussion on the official forums since like forever. Probably not different for PG forums.
Because it's, like, quite an obvious thing. But also quite hard or even impossible to pull off.
The game design of PG/PzC is a weird beast to begin with, individual units of Tiger tanks, individual units of AA, the scale of the map, which often varies greatly between scenarios, all that stuff. It's a vast simplification. And it might be impossible to build campains in the way you describe, where all those minor units stay relevant.
You'd have to change so much, it wouldn't be the same kind of game anymore.
Because, when all is said and done, I think we WANT our untouchable supertank unit or maxed out infantry that really kicks some arse and can be called upon for the really tough job. And the only way to counter this for scenario designers is then to put the player into a sort of (mostly offensive, thus inverted) this-is-sparta situation.
In such situations, you can't afford to have sub-par units as a player. Because in order to break through the superbly defended frontlines and capture those 5 objectives by turn 9, you can't afford to tag along stationary tank defense units or even low-tier units in general.
One suggestion I remember was to give units "weights", so you can face 4 low-tier tanks or 1 top-tier one, but if the low-tier ones are essentially worthless, that doesn't really change much.
Since you came up with the AD&D comparison, I think it's best to look at it this way: When your AD&D character is high level, how comes you usually don't fight, say orcs anymore? It looks as if there are no more orcs in the world to begin with, and if there are, it's always orc warlords, high shamans or orc assassins not really comparable to the 5hp counterparts you faced when you were still low level.
Obviously, it would just be pointless and boring for a high level party to chop up 15 orcs and an orc leader that couldn't even touch them.
Are there no more orcs? I'd say, it's just assumed other, lower tier parties deal with them chaff now, whilst you get busy hunting down those demons from the nine hells.
It's an abstraction. And in the same way, 15 Panthers and Tigers in your PG core are an abstraction, the lower level support units are still out there, just "not depicted".
